Voxeo Talks

An interesting blurb from this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, entitled “OMG, I’m Answering a Poll Honestly,” suggested that questions about sensitive topics – and questions with numerical answers – may be more precisely answered when the poll is conducted via text messages versus voice:

“Researchers asked questions of more than 600 iPhone users, both by voice and text… You might expect more caution in texts, which leave a trail, but texters gave less flattering (and therefore presumably more accurate) answers, confessing to higher levels of drinking and less churchgoing, for instance. And on questions demanding numerical answers, texters gave fewer round numbers, suggesting they were trying to be precise.”

The New School for Social Research and the University of Michigan conducted this study. There are a variety of reasons the text answers may have yielded increased detail – most potential explanations center around the fact that text messaging is asynchronous, eliminating the pressure to respond immediately that comes with a voice conversation, which can result in more thoughtful answers to open-ended questions and eliminate the pressure to round or guess at answers to numeric questions; privacy issues and surrounding distractions might also be in play, as both could be more likely to affect a voice conversation than a text one.

The results are intriguing for anyone who polls their customer base – if you know that most of your demographic has phones that support text messaging, the answers you get via text may be more specific and detailed. And as communication preferences evolve and texting becomes even more pervasive, this functionality will be even more valuable. This is one of the reasons the ability to build an application once and deploy it across any communication channel that Voxeo VoiceObjects offers is so valuable – it’s easy to survey your customer base using traditional outbound IVR techniques, via SMS or even to collect responses through social media (e.g., Twitter).

An informed and engaged customer is the best kind of customer. Are you proactively communicating with your customers?

Join Ovum, MicroAutomation and Voxeo for our upcoming webinar “Turning Customer Service Inside Out with Proactive Customer Engagement” on Wednesday, May 9th, 2012 at 1 PM Eastern. We will share proven best practices and examples of how businesses are using outbound communications, such as proactive customer service and notifications via IVR and text, to increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs and remain competitive.

Join us to learn:

• How to use industry metrics to assess the benefits of moving from reactive to proactive, with illustrative case studies
• Application of best practices in designing a successful outbound solution that balances both customer expectations and company business needs
• How to use outbound to effectively manage call volume and spikes
• The advantages and trade-offs to consider with the supporting platform and infrastructure decisions
• How to best identify high-value and high-priority applications for maximum short- and long-term measurable ROI

Click here to register today!

All attendees will receive a copy of Ovum’s new white paper: Best Practices in Proactive Outbound Customer Contact

Continuing the series of questions coming out of our webinar, “Best Practices in Deploying Communication Applications: Cloud vs On-Premises vs Hybrid“, let’s ask the question:

#7 Can the cloud keep up with innovation better that what you can deliver inside your enterprise?

Communications technology doesn’t stand still. Is the cloud communication provider you are considering keeping on the leading edge (or even the bleeding edge) of technology? Or are your enterprise data centers farther ahead that the cloud provider?

More to the point, when some new technology comes along, does the cloud provider have a history of rapidly making new technology available? Or can you make that new technology available faster on your own?

In my personal opinion, the cloud should be able to keep you on the leading edge of communication tech. This is to me one of the great strengths of the “cloud”… letting you play with new technologies and services, before you deploy them within your enterprise.

I’ll give you two examples from Voxeo’s history. Back in August 2009 when we added text messaging (SMS) and instant messaging (IM) to our hosted cloud, we made it so that with a change of a button within a web interface a voice app could also become a text messaging / IM app:

Beyond changing that button and confirming the application file you wanted to use for text messaging, that was all you had to do. The cloud just brought this capability to you.

Similarly, when we added support to Tropo.com back in March 2010 to create Twitter applications, it was again with a very simple addition of a web form:

Click the link, go through the Twitter OAuth process and… ta da… your application is now responding to Twitter messages!

That’s the kind of innovation the cloud should be able to deliver to you… and is something to consider in the “cloud vs premise” debate… can the cloud connect you with new innovative forms of communication faster and more reliably than you can do yourself?

There are so many times when I just love the utter simplicity of our services!  I know… DUH! … you expect me to say that.  Sure. But seriously… I was speaking with a reporter at the Voxeo booth at SpeechTEK and she asked the question:

How hard is it to add SMS to an existing voice application?

To which I was delighted to be able to just say:

Let me show you!

I whipped out my laptop, logged into Evolution, and showed her the one single radio button:

Powerful simplicity!  I love it!

We were very pleased to announce at SpeechtTEK this morning in New York that we have extended our 100% Uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA) to text messaging (SMS).  For many years, we’ve offered a 100% Uptime SLA for voice/IVR … essentially we believe so strongly in our infrastructure that we’ll credit your account if we have any downtime.  Today we extended that 100% Uptime SLA to text messaging (SMS).

Today, so many companies are starting to use text messaging as a way to communicate with their customers.  However, companies are NOT thinking about the reliability of their text-messaging services. Yet, if text messaging is to be a core part of your customer communication, you really need mission-critical reliability.

That’s what we announced today!

We also explained again our SMS offering and offered a video:

• Outbound Messaging. Allows applications to send outbound text messages and campaign blasts.  Used to provide proactive alerts, send reminders, and allow users to take action on messages, such as accepting an offer, making a payment, or confirming an appointment.  
• Inbound Messaging. Allows applications to receive inbound text messages and automatically reply with requested information, present users with dynamic menus or choices, and route requests appropriately. 
• Normal phone numbers.   Voxeo customers can send messages from and receive messages to “normal” phone numbers, such as (407) 555-1212 in the US.  Phone numbers for the US and other countries around the world are available from Voxeo on-demand, ready in just minutes, with no wait times or significant monthly costs.
• Short-code phone numbers. Voxeo customers can also send and receive text messages using “short code” phone numbers, such as 12345.  Short codes take more time to obtain from mobile carriers but are best for high-volume or high-profile text messaging applications.  Voxeo manages the short code provisioning from start to finish.
• Multi-Modal Interactions.  Companies can also use Voxeo to deliver “multi-modal” applications that use both voice and text in the same customer interaction or with the same phone numbers. For instance, a customer calling to make a payment through an automated voice system could then receive a SMS confirming the transaction.
• Development Simplicity. Voxeo’s easy-to-use tools enable developers to create new SMS text-messaging applications – and to text-enable any existing VoiceXML application with very few or even no changes. In addition, customers can use  Voxeo’s VoiceObjects Application LifeCycle Suite to graphically build one application and seamlessly deploy it across multiple channels including voice, SMS, IM, video, and the mobile web – all while accounting for differences in user interfaces.  Alternatively, customers can use a simple HTTP-based API to send and receive SMS messages.
• 24X7 Monitoring and Support. Voxeo provides unmatched technical support and customer service. Unlike other vendors with limited, tiered, or cost-based support models, Voxeo Customer Obsession teams are available to Voxeo customers for free 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to rapidly resolve issues, answer any questions, and  share best practices.

The short video demonstrates how easy it is to create text messaging apps:

How to Create Text Messaging (SMS) Applications on Voxeo’s Platform

If you would like to try this out yourself, simply go to evolution.voxeo.com, sign up for a free account and check out our tutorials.  And when you are ready to launch you’re application into production, we’ll be glad to talk about our 100% Uptime SLA!

Join us for this session, scheduled for July 22, 2010.

In this developer jam session, Tobias Goebel will show you how to use VoiceObjects (Voxeo’s service creation, execution and reporting environment) as the front-end and IMified (Voxeo’s hosted texting platform) as the back-end to deliver self-service over SMS with unmatched ease of development and time to market.

Topic: Providing Self-Service Through SMS Applications

Date: July 22, 2010

Time: 8:00 AM Western, 11:00 AM Eastern, 5:00 PM Central European

REGISTER NOW

We were very pleased to see this great write-up in the blog of the New York State Senate Office of the CIO, “Dialing in to the NYSenate OpenLeg API“, that outlines the great work that independent developer Mark Headd has done.

As the article notes, Mark has used our IMified platform to let people find out the status of legislation before the NY State Senate using:

• Instant Messaging Client (Jabber): opensenate@bot.im
• Twitter Client: Send a tweet formatted as a @reply to @opensenate
• Short Message Service (SMS): Send a text message to (315) 308-1943
• Regular Telephone: Call (646) 736-2439 (see note below)

Through whichever channel people want to use, they can now query the NY State Senate legislation database and find out the status of various bills. As the NY State Senate blog post author, Nathan Freitas, stated:

These services fit very well with the Office of the CIO’s vision for a fully mobile-accessible legislative body, where everyone from elected officials to their consituents can fluidly connect with eachother around issues that matter to them no matter where they are. Access of information via mobile phones also signficantly leverages the playing field when it comes to cost… a $99 iPhone is a pretty fantastic computing device.

Mark went into more details on his own blog in a post, “Leveraging the Government 2.0 Platform“, specifically noting that the exposure of an open API by the NY State Senate was the exciting part to him:

When governments make their data available in public formats, and expose APIs for querying such data, they are throwing the door open to outside developers to build useful things. That’s significant, and the NY Senate should get some major props for being among the first (if not the first) legislative body in the country to provide an API for their legislative information.

When governments make data available through an API, they are telling developers: “Use any platform or programming language you want to access our data.” The basic requirements for invoking an API like the NY Senate’s (or the District of Columbia’s 311 API) is the ability to communicate via HTTP and to parse XML, or JSON. Since pretty much every modern programming language and development platform can do these things, it creates opportunities for developers of all stripes.

But if APIs are platform and language agnostic, they are also modality agnostic – if the data exposed through an API is compact enough, there are lots of different ways to present this data to an end user.

Mark also notes that his application actually uses two of Voxeo’s platforms. The IM, SMS and Twitter interfaces come through IMified and the voice comes through our hosted Prophecy platform (via our Evolution developer portal). As we announced recently, SMS and IM integration are now available directly to Evolution users and now creating multi-modal / multichannel applications just got that much easier!

Kudos to the NY State Senate Office of the CIO for providing their open API and to Mark Headd for the great work he did making that API accessible to people through voice, IM, SMS and Twitter.

Great to see!